In the next draft of my personal writing piece, I tried to take my experience at Big Red’s and turn it into a poem. I liked the brevity of my zero draft and I thought the brevity would lend itself naturally to poetry. What I forgot was that I generally have a poor sense of how to craft a poem. I think you can tell the places where I sort of gave up on the project and just typed prose. I consider the resulting “poem” a disaster, so after finishing this draft I abandoned the idea of telling this story as a poem all together. This is completely unrevised because I didn’t really feel the need to work on crafting it any more when I knew it wasn’t going to work out. I didn’t even subject my writing group to it. I reluctantly include it here only in the interest of total writing process transparency.
Big Red’s, Kenova, WV: termed a “trading post,” but essentially a semi-permanent yard sale.
I noticed wheelchairs for sale. I’d been on the look out for a cheap one. They had three: nice, sort-of-nice, and hunk-of-junk.
Goldilocks-like, I sat in all three.
They had to rouse Big Red from the trailer to quote me a price. She was not happy stepping into the June heat of the gravel parking lot, ice water in hand. Sixty-five, forty-five and the hunk-of-junk wasn’t technically for sale.
I asked her to name a figure. She said five dollars sounded about square.
I wheeled it around for a few minutes. I didn’t want to waste a whole five dollars on a wheelchair that didn’t wheel.
I decided I wanted it and she decided my want was reason enough to hike the price.
“Oh, I don’t know if I could let it go for five dollars…”
I don’t know if it was the heat or the three hours sleep, but what ensued was not my finest moment
yelling at a septuagenarian in an attempt to save a few dollars on a busted up piece of medical equipment.
I took a tone. She took offense.
“You don’t have to buy this.”
“You’re damn right I don’t have to buy this.”
“Here’s your money then.”
Her son, perhaps recognizing the point of pride might not be worth a lost sale on a wheelchair which I had loudly proclaimed not just ten seconds prior that no one else on the planet Earth would pay a penny for wisely intervened.
I paid ten dollars and received no help loading it into my trunk.
